Sydney Olofe DESMA9

On Wednesday, April 24th, I had the opportunity to visit the Pigeon Art Studio and learn more about the hard work that led to the creation of "Pigeon Art". The overarching goal of Professor Blaisdell and his team is to "understand the 'why' and 'how' of why pigeons make art" to hopefully use them as a stepping stone into understand the fundamentals of human art (Blaisdell). One of the featured birds at the exhibit was Darwin, the star of their event. She's described to be a gentle and sweet bird with the intellect that surpassed the lab's understanding at the time. She was the first pigeon to figure out how to paint using the touchscreen and filled countless screens with imaginative shapes and colors. After years of contribution, Darwin has gone to learn more advance skills; like fast mapping, which is a type of quick learning that ties into the language learning skills seen in children. A photo of Darwin's art piece Another integral pige

This week we learned about the interconnectedness of medicine, art, and technology. In Hippocratic's modern version of his speech he relays that "there is art to medicine as well as science...". Art pla ys a huge role when it comes to medicine as it's responsible for mapping out the body to creating little characters to get children excited to learn about the benefits of medicine.  An example of this would be Virgil Wong. He is a man that stands at the forefront of medical advancement and technology. He has gone to create a plethora of websites and databases like WeillCornell.com, a healthcare portal that gives patients access to their own health files and an online space where they could virtually contact their doctors. He "create[s] avatars and symptom data visualizations to help physicians see their patients more clearly" and he was able to achieve this with the creation of Medical Avatar. Medical Avatar is a program where you enter one of their "Hea

This week's topic focused on robots and how they incorporate themselves into art. There's no surprise that robotics is an art form as the scientists that work tirelessly to perfect their craft have to weave in countless amounts of patterns to have a functional robot.  Robots transitions from being machines incapable of feeling emotion to machines that can 'feel' empathy for humans. Many forms of media experiment with this idea daily and you can see an abundance of this topic in children's media. One example would be the Disney Channel movie Meet The Robinsons , as the main character is transported into the future filled with robots who can not only speak but are apart of the family. Unfortunately for the main character, they have to fight against one of their own creations as it gained sentience and tries to destroy the world by using an army of mechanical hats. In lecture it was brought up how easy the assembly line, patented by Ford, was able to create a multitude

After reviewing this week's topic, I was truly blown away with how interconnected math, art, and science are. I already had some prior knowledge that math and art were connected some how when it to more structural art elements like vanishing points. The theorem states that "if two or more lines in the real world are parallel to one another, but not parallel to the picture plane, then they have the same vanishing point" (Frantz). Many artists used vanishing points as a way to take advantage of a person's perspective and create the illusion of something 'disappearing', despite it still being present. The culmination of these ideas resulted in Einstein's theory called the Einsteinian Relativity Theory and how it proposed an existence of a 4th dimension. His theory became revolutionary as it "encouraged artists to depart from visual reality and to reject completely the one-point perspective system that... had portrayed the world as three-dimensional"

Hi, my name is Sydney and I'm a third year physiological sciences major. Ever since transferring to UCLA, most of my friends would constantly ask me if I have classes on North or South campus. In turn, I would respond with, "What's the difference?" My old school was relatively small so there was never any distinction between North and South as all the students were blended together.  The difference here is jarring as North Campus can be seen as more 'vibrant and chill' compared to the 'hard-working and serious' South Campus. One for humanities and the other for the sciences, that's it. I often asked my humanities friends if they ever visit South Campus before and they told me that they avoid this place like the plague as there's no need for them to be over here. I was baffled by the fact since every quarter I would always have classes on both sides of campus which I recently found out wasn't normal.  This divide of groups was heavily talked